Windows: As expected, Opera made version 10.5 of its browser official this morning, calling it "the fastest browser on Earth" and also touting its Windows 7 integration, HTML5 video support, better private browsing, and more.

Windows: Opera's development team has cranked out no less than four 10.5 release candidate…
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In terms of HTML5 and video, Opera has gone the way of Firefox, supporting native, Flash-free streams of the Ogg Theora format, but not H.264. Apple's Safari supports only H.264, and Google Chrome supports both. Opera has also added in extensive Windows 7 graphical look and taskbar support, as we've detailed, and also added the seemingly requisite "private browsing" option.

Windows only: The latest beta (release candidate) version of the Opera browser adds total Windows 7 …
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What the Opera developers are really touting, though, is Opera's JavaScript and page loading speeds—and we don't blame them. Here are two quick reminders of how Opera's 10.5 pre-alpha (labeled erroneously as a beta in these charts) fared against its competition. First in JavaScript:

Firefox 3.6 is out, Chrome's stable version got a big upgrade, and Opera 10.5 is inching…
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And in "cold" (right off a reboot) and "warm" (having previously opened) start-ups:

Opera's certainly managed to get everyone's attention with their new Carakan engine, that's for sure. In our own tests, Opera 10.5 feels very snappy and lightweight when moving about the web, and that's without the server-caching Turbo turned on.

Opera 10.5 is a free download for Windows systems only; Mac and Linux users should expect their own versions to follow very soon.